That’ll Teach Me To Neglect My Site

We all get busy.

I mean, so busy that I haven’t written a post on this site in five years? Yes, that’s what it looks like.

In that time, I stopped writing about Cleveland State for Campus Pressbox, and, well, everyone else. But I rebooted the HoriZone Roundtable podcast, expanded it to a full Web site, and now, we hit 200 episodes this next week.

But if you follow me on Twitter, well, you already knew this.

Also in that time, I jumped off Instagram (which apparently was a good idea, given how many people complain about it now), went through the pandemic like everyone else (although thankfully, still no COVID for me), experienced a couple of losses (my mother-in-law and sister-in-law), moved to Indiana then back to Ohio. Plus I have a Mastodon account now (mastodon.social/@bobmcdonald, if you’re scoring at home), in case Twitter finally goes kaput (‘Sup, Elon?).

So, with all that happening, you can understand why the writing might have fallen by the wayside. I yanked The Gray Summer off the Kindle Store with hopes of actually retooling it, but never really got around to it. You can still find it in paperback on Amazon, though. Outside of fiction, I tried my hand at Substack newsletters, and that lasted, well, about three issues.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only thing that fell by the wayside. My personal site, bobmcdonaldwrites.com, got super-glitchy somewhere along the line. My guess is it probably crashed around June of 2021, along with every other Web site I host, the end result of someone never changing their password that led to hackers invading.

You may be wondering, “If that happened in 2021, why did it take this long to check your personal site?” I don’t really have a good answer for you. But I did finally get around to fixing the problems. And by fixing, I mean completely reinstalling WordPress and importing my old data. I’m glad I was able to do that without any issues, and it should remind us all to save our work. I learned that lesson years ago when 150 pages of the first iteration of The Gray Summer disappeared off the planet.

So, what happens to my site now? Well, probably nothing. All the things I’ve been busy with I really haven’t stopped doing, but I may pop in here occasionally to post something related to writing every now and then.

Also, this gives me a chance to test out that Mastodon autopost plug-in I just installed, since it isn’t one of the social networks listed on Jetpack. So, hi, everyone in the Fediverse. Hope this works!